Radio UserLand 8 is the latest installment in a story that began almost 15 years ago. The plot has taken twists and turns that have left many people (including me, at times) bewildered. Sailing on a tumultuous sea, UserLand's founder, Dave Winer, has had to tack frequently — towards the GUI, then the web; towards the server, then the client. Along the way, certain principles have remained constant:
The Frontier scripting engine.
Frontier does things differently than Perl or Python, but it can do the same things — including, notably, client- and server-side web services using SOAP or XML-RPC.
The Frontier framework.
Frontier's scripting engine is embedded in a framework that includes an object database and an HTTP server. Frontier's scripting engine is to its surrounding framework as Python is to Zope.
Writing and outlining.
Radio's tree-oriented editor has roots even deeper than Frontier's. Its ancestry dates back to Living Videotext's Macintosh outliner/wordprocessor, MORE. Radio developers continue to use this editor to write and edit scripts or HTML, and to manage the database. Radio users can also use it to write and edit HTML documents, though I'll bet most will prefer the MS DHTML edit control that's integrated with the product. In a previous Napster-inspired incarnation of Radio, the editor was featured as a tool for organizing and publishing song lists, and also as a tool for organizing and publishing web directories.
Local HTTP service.
Back in 1998, I got really excited about the possibilities of a local web server as a development platform. So did Dave, and he's been experimenting ever since. In this incarnation of Radio, the primary interface for managing content is no longer the GUI-based editor (though it's still available), but instead, a browser-based editor that interacts with Radio's local httpd. Why the shift of emphasis? Radio aims to radically democratize its approach to web writing and publishing.
The Great Debate: PostgreSQL vs. MySQL Common industry perceptions of MySQL and PostgreSQL aren't as true with the current generation of releases as they used to be. DBAs, developers, and IT managers and decision-makers will benefit from this presentation and live Q&A about the pros and cons of using PostgreSQL or MySQL, which will include a discussion about the ongoing trend towards using open source in the enterprise.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008 - 9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET
In this volume of Best of BYTE, we explore the emergence of some heuristic algorithms. Although we have only scratched the surface of this intriguing subject, we hope we've suggested the potential of the synthesis of heuristics and algorithms.
